The disclosure relates generally optical fibers and, more specifically, to large effective area, optical fibers with low attenuation which may be used in Raman-amplified transmission system applications.
The explosive growth in the volume and variety of multi-media telecommunication applications continues to drive speed demands for internet traffic and motivate research in long-haul fiber-optic telecommunication.
Modern high-data-rate coherent transmission systems are already approaching information capacity limits. To exploit the remaining capacity in optical fiber, advanced multi-level modulation formats, such as QAM, and/or superchannel or OFDM systems will be needed. However these systems require higher signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) than are currently feasible. Fiber nonlinearities and fiber attenuation are the key performance limitations that prevent the higher SNRS from being achieved.
Raman based fiber amplification depends on a nonlinear optical effect, but there is a tradeoff between fiber's effective area, loss, and Raman pump power. As the fiber effective area increases, deleterious nonlinear distortions decrease, but the Raman gain drops, making it difficult to achieve the desired high power signal levels.
No admission is made that any reference cited herein constitutes prior art. Applicant expressly reserves the right to challenge the accuracy and pertinence of any cited documents.